Extraordinary news from The Guardian!

The bien pensants at The Guardian are credulous consumers of climate doomster stories. So this science news story is extraordinary. It debunks a long-time favorite story of the Left about the coming end times, when Antarctica slides into the sea. See this excerpt of the opening and closing (red emphasis added).

“An emotive article on the ‘ice apocalypse’ by Eric Holthaus describes a terrifying vision of catastrophic sea level rise this century caused by climate change and the collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet. But how likely is this – and how soon could such a future be here? …

“I was particularly concerned about some of the implied time scales and impacts. That ‘slowly burying every shoreline …creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees …could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years’ (it could begin then, but would take far longer). That ‘the full 11 feet’ could be unlocked by 2100 (Rob and Dave predicted the middle of next century). That cities will be ‘wiped off the map’ (we will adapt, because the costs of protecting coastlines are predicted to be far less than those of flooding). We absolutely should be concerned about climate risks, and reduce them. But black-and-white thinking and over-simplification don’t help with risk management, they hinder.

“Is ‘the entire scientific community [in] emergency mode’? We are cautious, and trying to learn more. Climate prediction is a strange game. It takes decades to test our predictions, so society must make decisions with the best evidence but always under uncertainty. I understand why a US-based climate scientist would feel particularly pessimistic. But we have to take care not to talk about the apocalypse as if it were inevitable.”

What does this mean?

For three decades the Left has given confident predictions increasingly dire scenarios about out ever-changing climate.

The latest: the end of humanity and devastation of the Earth — predictions with little support in the peer-reviewed literature or work of the IPCC. For example, the 10 July 2017 issue of NY Magazine featured “Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells — “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.” This was the most-read article it its history.

This campaign to influence US public policy — the largest in our history — has been almost totally ineffective. Has the Left realized this and returned to relying on science to inform to public — rather than exaggerations and partial truths to terrify people? That would mean using the work of the IPCC and major climate agencies (rather than cherry-picking bits and pieces), and above all looking at the full range of scenarios used in IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report.

More good news!

“Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

“This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: ‘At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions. …The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died.’ …”

“In 2007, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic declined rapidly. The drop from the previous year was so precipitous that it garnered worldwide attention and media coverage. In the last couple of years, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic, measured by the amount of square miles it covers, has recovered. This series of events, which underscored the year-to-year variability of the measurement, has made researchers cautious about describing events in the Arctic.

“’In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,’ Serreze said. ‘There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.’ …”

(6) “Contribution of Antarctica to past and. future sea-level rise” by Robert M. DeConto and David Pollard in Nature, 31 March 2016 — “Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500, if emissions continue unabated.” Note the wild alarmism of that. There are no reliable estimates of fossil fuel resources that allow “unabated” burning in the 22nd century, let alone through to the 25th century.

To learn more about the state of climate change…

“In recent years the media, politicians, and activists have popularized the notion that climate change has made disasters worse. But what does the science actually say? Roger Pielke, Jr. takes a close look at the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the underlying scientific research, and the data to give you the latest science on disasters and climate change. What he finds may surprise you and raise questions about the role of science in political debates.”

14 thoughts on “Good news about climate change from an amazing source!”

More good news!

“The visualisation below shows recent trends in coal production by region, since 1981. Overall, we see that global coal production more than doubled over this period. Although too early to confirm, global coal production appears to have peaked over the years 2013-14, with several years of declining production since. This would represent a significant peak in global energy, with coal being the first fossil fuel energy source.”

I saw Tamin Edwards’ article and noted it as a rare break in the consensus narrative. I’ve also seen the backlash Ms. Edwards has suffered on Twitter, but it has appeared she’s holding up well. The danger, of course, is that she’s reluctant to go off-narrative in the future.

Yes, that is how paradigms are defended in science. It’s a brutal and often unfair process, showing how science is not a mystical search for truth but a specific kind of sociological process. I find it odd that Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most-cited and frequently read books about science — yet its conclusions are mostly unknown or misunderstood.

I strongly recommend reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is a transformative book. After reading it you will see articles about science, past and present, in a different light. Much behavior that seemed irrational will appear as rational.

People’s behavior at work is seldom irrational. Usually that conclusion results from not seeing the world as the others do.

45 years ago Kuhn’s work was required reading for a Humanities course I took.

If Kuhn was alive today he would likely have a class covering Simon Winchester’s “Krakatoa- The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883.” I concur with The Denver Post that the work …”successfully blended history and science to create a concoction that is sure to please.”

I obtained the Winchester work back in 2006 during a walk about in a university library. The author covers the scientific debate leading to the acceptance of plate tectonics. His approach of using real life examples of what happens when they (the plates) move made the telling of the story (telegraph enabled) rather interesting.

I always thought that there would be a kind of balance if there was a lot more precipitation worldwide under a slightly higher global temp – since some amount of that would fall on Greenland or in the Himalayas (maybe also Antarctica) and form snowpack and eventually glaciers. That never seemed to come up much, although I would not be shocked if it was considered and found to still be a net deficit.

I suspect that if nothing else we’ll be able to make much better climate models in a hundred years (not that it will do me much good in this lifetime) just due to accumulated data. Might have to worry about the waste heat from our fusion reactors then.

“Changes in the global water cycle in response to the warming over the 21st century will not be uniform. The contrast in precipitation between wet and dry regions and between wet and dry seasons will increase, although there may be regional exceptions.”

It also gives some speculation about regional changes — weakly described as “likely”, because today’s climate models do regional predictions with much less reliability than global changes.

There is no mention of “a lot more precipitation” from a “slightly higher global temp”. There is little evidence of that in past trends:

“Confidence in precipitation change averaged over global land areas since 1901 is low prior to 1951 and medium afterwards. Averaged over the mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere, precipitation has increased since 1901 (medium confidence before and high confidence after 1951). For other latitudes area-averaged long-term positive or negative trends have low confidence.”

Good stuff, thanks for the links! You’ve been at this a lot longer than I have.I suppose I internalized the repetitions of “well there’s going to be worse rainstorms, Natural Disasters Are The New Normal” just because people keep blaring it on and on. Half the time I think I would be better educated if I read less news and more books – even if they were just novels.